vapor host?

[rsowen]

Someone calling himself "OSI Hosting" is making the news by saying that he is ready to start building "more than a dozen buildings and hire 11,000 to 12,000 employees" (ktbs.com/news-detail.html/?cityid=1&hid=25850).

Whois shows that he registered osihosting.com a year ago. The web site claims that "by the end of March we will have over 22,000 dedicated servers running SuSE, making OSI the world's largest Dedicated Hosting facility even above the recent market forerunner EV1Servers" (osihosting.com/about/). Whois and traceroute for osihosting.com appear to go to EV1 hosting.

Is there any way to find equipment that this entity owns? Rents? Any way to find the amount of traffic that it hosts?

[Frank Hagan]

If you can find out the state he is planning on opening up his data centers in, you can find out if he has registered the business name, and when. But as far as finding out exactly what he has purchased, that will be hard to do for servers, etc. Customer records usually aren't released.

You could find information about real estate sales, but probably not leases.

[sdjl]

...you can find out if he has registered the business name, and when...

Over here in the UK accounts have to be published yearly for any registered company. This means they have to be publicly availble. You could look for those to see what money is being spent where if similar laws apply over there.

David

[openbox]

That's true in the US too if the company is a publicly owned company.

[CasualObserver]

Looks like a vapor company...

Did a Yahoo / Google search on the company name "OSI Hosting" and found the following cached page on Yahoo:

Link to Yahoo Page Archive

Person sounds out of touch with reality that runs it.

[rsowen]

Thanks for the archived link - hadn't seen that one. Looks like there was indeed more than a single person involved, even if the post suggests that this is not a hosting service with its own 22,000 servers in its own million square feet of building space (as the guy appears to claim).

Still trying to figure out how to find out where a hosting service does its hosting. E.g., if I knew nothing more than the name dathorn.com -- if dathorn otherwise had a totally dead forum and totally dead web site -- how could I find out if it actually does any hosting? Whois and traceroute of dathorn.com wouldn't lead me to its herd of servers at The Planet.

[sdjl]

There's actually two more links on this one. From pixelated dreams.

The truth behind OSI hosting
The truth behind OSI hosting - Part II
The truth behind OSI hosting - Part III

Happy reading

David

Edit:
There's also a load of links on Part III of the above links.
Looks like OSI is a no go area

[XE|Sebastian B.]

Its definately tough. Even if you have an account hosted with Dathorn, except for the fact that the IP is shared, if you have a private one, i think you are fairly invisible to other people. I am taking a look at the whois.sc information provided for one of my domains, and the only thing that really traces back to dathorn is the IP address (which doesnt even trace directly to Dathorn, but rather to The Planet)

[Frank Hagan]

Thanks for the archived link - hadn't seen that one. Looks like there was indeed more than a single person involved, even if the post suggests that this is not a hosting service with its own 22,000 servers in its own million square feet of building space (as the guy appears to claim).

Still trying to figure out how to find out where a hosting service does its hosting. E.g., if I knew nothing more than the name dathorn.com -- if dathorn otherwise had a totally dead forum and totally dead web site -- how could I find out if it actually does any hosting? Whois and traceroute of dathorn.com wouldn't lead me to its herd of servers at The Planet.

The nameservers sometimes give you an indication ... for instance, the Dathorn nameservers are all "cpanelxx", where "xx" is a number. My custom nameservers include the name of my hosting company.

But whois shows all the sites on the server, based on its IP address, not just the nameservers. So even using the nameservers you can be fooled.

[rsowen]

Thanks to all for comments. The issue for me was in trying to find proof that the guy owned what he claimed to own - you cannot say in public that he doesn't own the assets or have the customers of a large hosting business if your only evidence is that you have failed to find these.

The story of thow easy it is to dupe local business people and news reporters is scary:

There was a rumor on the streets a few weekends ago that thousands of jobs were suddenly going to be planted in a relatively isolated town - roughly three hours from Dallas, three from Little Rock, six from Austin, seven fron Houston. The rumor was that some huge company named OSI was going to be planting a call center with hundreds of employees, a server manufacturing plant, an integrated circuit manufacturing plant, and a hosting service with tens of thousands of servers -- all on some plot of empty land. This was supposedly to result in thousands of hi-tech jobs.

Made no sense to me -- there isn't much of an infrastructure to connect to telephone or internet services to run these things. There is no infrastructure of programming and engineering skills available to support such a wild idea - a fifth of the population lives below the poverty level. Then there is the issue of a market that would buy these kinds of products at these quantities. It sounded downright stupid to me, and I offended the first person who told me about it by saying so.

When the second person repeated the rumor, I searched for this guy on the Web and came up with nothing. Whois showed a domain name that was exactly one year old - yet there were claims to be a hosting service with 22,000 servers. The guy has a lot of press releases that are printed over and over and over and over on idiot news services and Web sites that apparently print whatever is sent to them -- regarding partnerships with large corporations, huge equipment purchases, a hosting service with tens of thousands of servers, a claim of a million square feet of space to house servers, and such. Never any mention of any employee names except this one guy, crowning himself the title of CEO. No street addresses listed anywhere but whois. A 24/7 customer service number that is never answered. A forum that, for all the customers on the claim of 22,000 servers, only has a couple of posts by this same guy. As near as I could tell, the guy had nothing more than a Web site and a cell phone.

The following week, local TV and the newspaper broke the story that the CEO of this big company had recently announced that it was going to build a plant and bring thousands of jobs -- stuff repeated from these self-made press releases as if it was all verified fact. After all, if he has a D&B logo button on his Web site, he must be a legit big business, right?

It took a few days before anybody bothered to click on the D&B button ("company name not returned"), to do a whois, to call the 24/7 customer service number, to locate any street addresses in any of the cities that this guy claimed to have servers. By the end of the week, they were reporting that they were having trouble finding a building or a street address or working phone number, but reporters and business representatives still acted as though any wild claim involving so many jobs should be taken seriously.

Finally, someone actually took the time to show up at the address that is listed in whois. He or she instead ended up meeting the guy's dad, who didn't know anything about his kid's claim of a huge company and hundreds of employees.